Analysis of top-down control and spatial attention in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease based on Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention

Accumulating evidence suggests that deficits of visual selective attention may already occur at early stages of dementia like the prodromal phase of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). For the attentional assessment in patients with MCI and probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), we used partial report of brief letter arrays in combination with Bundesen's theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990). TVA provides two mathematically independent and quantitative parameter estimates: task-related weighting for prioritizing relevant visual objects (top-down control), and the spatial distribution of attentional weights across…